


Walking on Sunshine

by SummonerLuna



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 11:38:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5783986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SummonerLuna/pseuds/SummonerLuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes things move so fast, you forget there's more to the world than the two feet immediately in front of you. [Selphie. Trabia, Rebuilding, and who you really are.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walking on Sunshine

The smoke has not fully quit rising from the ashes of Trabia before time has stalled, stretched, and settled back into something familiar, and if it is not quite the same as it was before, Selphie does not notice.

They return to Matron and Ellone and tearful hugs, and Selphie grins and demands they celebrate—look at what they _survived,_ after all! She doesn't take the time to see the exhaustion on her comrades' faces, or pay any attention to what they will need to do to rebuild—they are here, they are now, and in a matter of days she is standing in the ballroom watching people dance, and laugh, and _smile,_ even amidst the damage, and if they can do it here, they need to do it everywhere, and she approaches Cid before the night is over to tell him what she wants to do.

He doesn't laugh, like he might have once. Selphie has always known Cid to laugh, in the short time since she came to Balamb. He laughs at everything, but he does not laugh at her. Later, she realizes it is because he felt sorry for her.

Later.

Now she sits down and talks and talks and talks, and he tells her okay.

Now, she claps and hugs him and kisses his forehead when she thanks him, and runs back to her friends and grabs Quistis and twirls her in a circle and has to repeat herself three times before her friend understands her she's talking so fast.

_He said yes._

She's leaving for Trabia in the morning.

.

She is greeted by Susan, her favorite instructor from before, just a few years older than herself, and is shocked at how little progress they have made since her last visit.

"Not enough hands," Susan says, and Selphie looks at the handful of students and faculty still there, the ones who have survived, the ones who have not found homes somewhere in the world-not-destroyed, and she feels something close to embarrassment.

"Then we better start using our feet," she says in response, and within the hour she is giving a speech to her Trabian brothers and sisters, and they are smiling and energized, and by the end of the day they are sitting in front of a fire blazing through the last of the debris, because they're never going to move forward if they're not willing to let go of the pieces of the past that are holding them down.

"You oughta get that friend of yours up here," Susan tells her, while they sit together listening to the glass-shard sounds of the dying embers. "The one you came with before. I bet he could get things going up here."

Selphie leans back and back, until she is laying down staring at the stars, and thinks of Squall, and Rinoa, and what the others must be doing back in Balamb. "We don't need him," she says, and means it.

.

In weeks, she finds herself in charge of the restoration, and Selphie is utterly overwhelmed by the level of expectation the others have placed on her. Their numbers have grown, friends recruiting friends, and she is no longer leading by keeping everyone smiling while they sift through the damage. Instead she sits in the shadow of the new perimeter, glued to a tablet Squall sent up from Balamb, sliding numbers back and forth across a screen and trying to force an answer to an unsolvable equation.

"Selphie!" Old and new friends shout to her as they walk past, and she waves, barely looking up as she chews the end of a stylus, false grins quickly fading back into concentrated frowns. _The reparations from Galbadia won't get here until the end of the month, and the donations from Esthar will only get us so far…_ They are running out of resources, but they have barely even begun, and she has no idea how to announce this, but she has an idea about what it will mean for the restoration if she tells them it must be placed on hold.

There is a burst of laughter from somewhere inside the framework of their new Garden, followed by Susan and a few other members of the original team. Susan sees her and waves, and calls her over to join them. Selphie looks down at the tablet again, at the red numbers she just can't figure out how to reconcile, and thinks, _oh, fuck it,_ and slips the tablet into her bag and runs off to join them.

It isn't until morning, when she wakes up hours before the others and looks out from the window of the rough set of crew housing they have built at the newly fallen snow, that she realizes in two days it will be Quistis' birthday. Her throat tightens and something behind her eyes feels hot, and she sends a message to Rinoa asking if she can make sure there are presents, and dinner, and a cake, and hopes the timestamp goes unnoticed.

.

The check from Deling City comes not on paper, but in the form of cranes, concrete, and a neckbeard who insists on calling her 'Miss.'

Selphie stands back and listens to Susan and a couple of the other original restoration members defend her while the court-appointed foreman from Galbadia walks the lower foundation and points out all the flaws in their construction, each time prefaced with a snide comment about the level of tolerance whomever has been leading things has shown for poor craftsmanship.

"He's an ass," Susan insists later, and Selphie doesn't hear it.

It is nearly Witches' Night, and she doesn't see weak support and uneven measurements. She sees costumes, and black and purple decorations, and pathways lit without hundreds of candles. Not for the first time she wants to toss her tablet into a snowbank somewhere and go back to a life when none of this was her responsibility. When the most she had to do was plan _parties,_ not plan the re-building of an entire academy—of an entire _world,_ as far as the people who lived there were concerned.

"Selphie? Are you listening?"

_What?_ "If he comes with the rest of Deling's resources, I'll put up with him." She cringes to hear the words come out of her mouth, and doesn't have time to dwell on it. She thinks instead to a few months back, when she first got to Trabia, and where they were then, compared to where they are now. The feeling of time crawling underneath her ski n flares up and she feels, for a moment, nauseous. She and Susan are walking back towards the crews' quarters, and she turns and looks at the silhouette of the lower level of the new Garden, changed so much just by the arrival of the team from Deling, and if she lets her vision blur the worklights dance like the light of thousand candles.

But if she lets her vision blur she feels the sting of tears, and she swallows and turns away.

.

She throws a party on Witches' Night anyway, and makes it a point to ask Neckbeard to dance, just to see how uncomfortable it makes him.

It reminds her of another party, on another night, with another face she forced to dance who was equally unenthused, and the memory is painful. Squall might have given her about thirty seconds of time just to shut her up, but there was _dancing_ , that night, and fun. Quistis, quiet and uncomfortable and enjoying herself nonetheless; Zell, loud and cocksure and making a complete fool of himself; Squall and Rinoa, so openly in love, no matter how private they thought they were keeping those feelings; the hundreds of SeeDs and cadets and teachers, all so happy to be alive; …..

She thinks of another party, and another time, and does not think of the unopened letters in the box under her bed she refuses to open until she knows she can take the time to respond.

.

The deadline is hers, and she holds the Deling team to it, so nervous the night before she can't sleep, and in the morning she doesn't believe it is ever going to happen, and it _does._

And when it does…

Her skin looks sallow in the artificial light, after months of seeing it only in candle and flare, and she doesn't realize how thin her wrists have become until she shakes Neckbeard's hand, the silver band on her arm Rinoa brought to her as a gift twinkling against her pale skin. She looks from her wrist, to his arm, to his face, and wants to ask him when he shaved but doesn't, stopping instead to ask herself how long it's been since she's truly taken the time to pay attention to anything outside of progress and expense reports; taken the time to talk to anybody about something other than the restoration.

"You run a pretty tight ship here, Tilmitt," he says, and she rolls her eyes, and thanks him for the cliché, but follows up with a genuine thank you.

"So why tonight?" he asks, and she stares at him for a few seconds, and squeaks out a response she can't remember, and turns, and crashes into Rinoa, and it is all she can do not to burst into tears.

"You," she says, and grabs her friend and clings to her, unaware of how starved she has been for human touch until she feels Rinoa's thin arms around her.

"Hi to you, too!" There is something in Rinoa's voice that Selphie knows she should find concerning, but she pulls her instead into the ballroom, ceiling nothing but beams of steel exposing the night sky, and starts pointing out everything they took from the way Trabia used to be, and the things they stole from Balamb, and Esthar, and what's going to go here, and here, and _here,_ and oh, Rinoa, don't you want to dance?

And they dance. And they talk. And they cover months' worth of conversation a thousand hurried phone calls could never quite express, and the night waxes and wanes, until it is only the two of them; until Rinoa can no longer pretend to hide how tired she is, and Squall appears out of the shadows to walk her to the newly finished dormitory wing.

She watches them retreat and looks around, at the walls, and the lights, and the _structure,_ and is surprised at how hard it is to smile when she finally flips the switch that cuts the lights in the open, empty ballroom space, and surprised still when she hears the flat pace of Squall's steps across the unpolished tile, following her to the other side of the wide room to what will eventually be the quad.

The moon is thin, and casts shadows across his face that make him look like a demon, and Selphie shivers. She hasn't seen him in months, and the first time she takes the time to look at him—at _him,_ not the him that is half of him with Rinoa, it is in half-light, and she turns away.

He clears his throat.

"Rinoa—she told me. This night…" he stops, and Selphie thinks back, months ago, even if it feels like years. _I must really look depressed if Squall is trying to comfort me,_ and she smiles.

"The longest night," she says.

"Back at the orphanage. Matron let us stay up. I don't remember doing it, but Elle told me. She let us stay up, but everyone would always fall asleep anyway. Except…you."

The tightness she has felt so many times returns to her throat, and Selphie nods, and Squall continues when she doesn't say anything.

"Rin told me you said you used to do it here."

"Every year."

"She wanted to stay up."

"Is she…okay?"

Squall doesn't say anything and Selphie shivers, and thinks of how thin Rinoa's arms were when they embraced, and the way she averted eye contact most of the night. It is the only answer she needs, and Selphie starts to change the subject, but the pain in her throat is too much for her to speak and the only noise she makes comes out dark and muted.

"When…" he pauses. "Sometimes things move so fast you forget there's more to the world than the two feet immediately around you."

Selphie looks at him, and Squall is staring at the sliver of moon, arms folded across his chest, and looking for all the world like he did so often during the war.

"Bet you never thought we'd have anything in common," she says after a minute, and when Squall finally looks at her she smiles, and he smiles back.

"Stranger things have happened," he says.

She shivers again, and Squall unfolds his arms, and pulls out a blanket he had tucked under his coat, and Selphie raises an eyebrow.

"If I didn't know any better, I'd think you had plans to stay out here with me."

He shrugs and lays out the blanket, and Selphie is only marginally surprised to discover it folds a layer of heat over her as soon as she crawls on top of it.

"Rinoa wanted to."

"Should we go get her?"

His silence is his answer, and Selphie leans back on the blanket, and looks at a layer of stars so thick it threatens to take her breath away.

It is awhile before either of them speak, and Selphie watches the moon, looking from the sky to the forest line, tracking the shadows as they shift with the movement of the light in the sky, and in time she realizes Squall has fallen asleep.

"You don't look around much either, do you?"

He looks even more serious than usual, and Selphie turns away. Her eyes burn and she yearns for conversation, but for all that lying beside him is a comfort it feels intrusive watching him, and anyway, seeing Squall under the starlight reminds her of their journey, and the long nights on the road, and a time when she wasn't in charge, and when she didn't have to give up her time, her energy, _herself_ in order to see things change.

_Because Squall did that?_

Because she had…

_People._

The dormitories are full tonight, and she is out here, in enough solitude that Squall Leonhart felt comfortable coming to join her.

She thinks of the road, and the conversations they had, and how she never felt alone. Not with Trabia, before, not with them, not until…

_Sometimes things move so fast you forget there's more to the world than the two feet immediately around you._

"Dammit," she says.

And finally, openly and without abandon, she cries.

.

Two days later she leaves Susan in charge, and takes the box of letters from under her bed and places them in the bag she takes with her when she follows Squall and Rinoa back to Balamb. She sits in the back of the small plane with Rinoa while Squall goes through paperwork neither of them care to hear about, and opens the first letter while Rinoa leans against her and reads a book.

Trabia will be open in another five months if all goes according to plan, and if it doesn't?

She has Balamb's Spring Festival to plan.

And a lot of letters to answer.


End file.
